'So emotional'

The militants have ordered families living near al-Nuri mosque also known as the Great Mosque to leave their houses and sealed all the roads leading to it, one resident said.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered a Friday sermon in al-Nuri mosque in 2014 after ISIS seized almost a third of Iraq and declared an Islamic “caliphate” on territory it controlled in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

The iconic 840-year-old ‘Crooked Minaret’ , which leans like Italy’s Tower of Pisa, survived because residents formed a human chain to protect it when ISIS militants came to blow it up.

The extremists demolished dozens of historic and archaeological sites in and around Mosul, saying they promote idolatry.

“The militants are not moving in groups anymore, we see one or two from time to time in the streets as a majority of them are moving through the houses, using the holes they made in the walls,” the resident told AP.

The UN estimates more than 100,000 people are still trapped in their houses in ISIS-held areas

Of those, there were 160 civilians killed and 52 wounded in Nineveh province, where Mosul is provincial capital.

The Iraqi government last October launched a wide-scale military offensive to recapture Mosul and the surrounding areas, with various Iraqi military, police and paramilitary forces taking part in the operation.

The city’s eastern half was declared liberated in January, and the push for the city’s western section, separated from the east by the Tigris River, began the following month.

Since then, the ISIS hold on Mosul has shrunk to just a handful of neighbourhoods in and around the Old City district.